Is there a God on the quad? Does American higher education have any chance of acknowledging, or even accommodating, religion? The young author Naomi Schaefer Riley visited twenty-five American colleges to find out, and her resulting book, God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America , is a fascinating study of a moment in American culture.

Riley begins by offering six impressionistic reports on institutions that plausibly claim to be serious about their religious identity and mission: Brigham Young, Bob Jones, Notre Dame, Thomas Aquinas, Yeshiva, and Baylor. God on the Quad then offers critical essays on trends she found at these and other colleges, particularly feminism, religious minorities, student life, the integration of faith and learning, and political activism.

Her campus visits began with four questions: Why had students chosen these schools? How were their curricula different from those of secular schools? What was campus life like outside the classroom? And how would these colleges and universities affect their alumnis later choices?

Rileys ear for character is sharp. A faculty member at Thomas Aquinas, a relatively new conservative Catholic campus, reminisced how he had joined the Church. A statement on abortion by his original Episcopal church was so this-worldly and mealy-mouthed; it didnt sound like Christ at all. It sort of disgusted me. He pauses for a moment, reliving the irritation. Here I am telling everybody that Rome and Canterbury are so close and that Anglicanism is just Catholic Christianity for English speaking people. Then when it comes time to speak with the voice of Christ, they speak with the voice of the New York Times .

Rileys lengthy story of the Yeshiva University in New York City makes a particularly good case study. Yeshiva”where the professional schools in medicine, law, and psychology dwarf Jewish and Hebraic studies”was an institution united ethnically and religiously, held together by a considerable underlay of Talmudic studies shared by a large proportion of the professional student population (whatever their academic majors) and strongly led throughout the past half-century by Solomon Soloveitchik. But when New York legislation in 1969 interdicted the use of the states generous all-purpose funding by denominational schools, Yeshiva saw no way to survive but to declare itself nondenominational”and then, in the most rigorous, legalistic way, not only to allow students majoring in the other disciplines to drop their formerly required study of Judaica, but to allow the more conservative rabbinical students to minimize their time in humanistic or scientific disciplines, making Yeshiva an institution at war with itself.

Through her case studies, Riley perceives a broad trend among the educated, including Catholics and Evangelicals, away from the classical male-female roles of wage earner and child rearer. She finds an interesting and probably controversial difference between the choices women were making regarding marriage and career no further back than the 1970s and those they are making now: As the students I interviewed demonstrate, women at religious colleges are reaching back into the foundations of their faiths for guidance in, and justification for, their decisions, she notes. The colleges themselves, rather than speeding along a process of secularization or stopping these women from achieving their full potential, are helping them to consider their futures in a more thoughtful manner, one in keeping with their religious beliefs.

As the book moves on, Riley notices that despite the emphasis placed on affirmative action for racial minorities, there is no assurance that religious fellowship itself might be functioning as a desirable and effective counterforce to segregation. Rather than using religious fellowship as a countervailing loyalty that might draw students together across racial boundaries, the schools own acknowledgement that members of a particular ethnic group are best suited to bring its other members into the fold supports secular societys tacit message that only people of the same race can truly understand each other and can therefore communicate best with each other.

Rileys book is well balanced on an issue of great importance on most campuses: the official recognition of homosexual student groups. She sees value in support groups, but it is a thin line between a group where students can seek guidance and support and an organization that appears to be condoning, if not facilitating through its social events, homosexual behavior. She is notably shrewd about the gambits of educators and institutions that dont want their religious identification to be taken too seriously. The students at such institutions are inclined to see gender, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, even regional origin, as more significant identifiers (and possibly separators) than their religion. She notes that colleges that take their distinctive religious professions seriously are likely to have more in common with each other than with colleges of the same faith that have experienced many different levels ofsecularization.

The trend toward generic religion leads one college president to remark that Christian universities, like Christian individuals, are not Christians in general. At least not for long. Ironically, says Riley, a policy of mere tolerance (understood as neutrality) can engender an intolerance of the religious perspective itself. She goes so far as to observe that at a few of these schools, like Notre Dame and Yeshiva, the students represent the most spiritually interested and morally serious element of the school.

Readers may find the books occasional sloppiness distracting. Many small typos and solecisms are lazily neglected. They are a minor matter in themselves, of course, but they could have been easily caught”and so they should have been, for continual sloppiness in the editing suggests to the reader a sloppiness in the writing. Nonetheless, God on the Quad is a thoughtful and critical book that reminds readers of how much is lost when religious colleges and universities forfeit their prophetic independence. It is hard to restore such independence once it is gone. But books like this one may make it easier.

Ishmael Law writes on Catholic theology and education.

]]>Ishmael Lawhttp://www.firstthings.com/article/2005/05/no-longer-neutralNegotiating Identity: Catholic Higher Education Since 1960http://www.firstthings.com/article/2000/08/negotiating-identity-catholic-higher-education-since
Tue, 01 Aug 2000 00:00:00 -0400 Ursuline Sister Alice Gallin is Father Theodore Hesburghs contemporary in the world of Catholic higher education. After twenty“five years as a faculty member, administrator, and trustee of the College of New Rochelle, she went to the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities in 1975 and soon became its executive director. On retirement in 1992 (except for board memberships and consultancies) she began researching this book, and managed to publish in the meantime American Catholic Higher Education: Essential Documents, 1967“1990 (1992) and Independence and a New Partnership in Catholic Higher Education (1996).

There is no one better placed to retell the story of Catholic educators latter“day attempt to stand with one foot in the Church and the other in the secular culture, and no one more steadfast in her belief that the boat has never drifted too far from the dock. What she presents is not a simple memoir; she has painstakingly searched a variety of archives to give many voices a hearing.

The title provides her master metaphor: Catholic higher education, especially since the 1960s, has been negotiating its identity with a number of new and mutually adverse constituencies”the secular culture, the educational establishment, the American Association of University Professors, the judiciary, the philanthropic foundations, the student market, the donors, the professoriat, the academic disciplines, and, reluctantly, the Church. What the thus far two“hundred“plus Catholic“presenting colleges and universities have mostly refused to notice is that these diverse competitors for their allegiance pull in diverse directions, and in their attempt to oblige them all, the educators did not negotiate their identity. They bargained it away.

Gallin capably evokes that strenuous yet promising period of the Catholic schools, the late fifties and early sixties. She reminds us of the familiar names that supplied the wherewithal by which Catholics crossed the threshold into the Big Time. There were the great foundations”Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Lilly, Danforth, Pew, Mellon; the generous new founts of governmental funding”GI Bill, NDEA, HEFA, BEOG, SEOG, SSIG, NSF, Fulbright, Bundy, Pell; the educational establishment in the city“state at One Dupont Circle”ACE, AAC, AAHE, NAICU, CIC, AAU, AGB, CGS, CASE, AAUP, AAAS; the faces and initiatives that put such a better face on the culturally parvenu Catholics”Pope John XXIII, Vatican II, Kennedy, Bea, Shuster, Murray, Hesburgh, Gannon, Küng, Novak; and the reassuring advocates of Catholic respectability”Riesman, Marty, Greeley, Kerr, Hassenger.

One day Catholics found the nerve to emulate the best and the brightest models of higher education, were delighted to find a welcoming patronage where previously they had been only patronized, and were abruptly offered competitive access to the resources that would finally make excellence possible. It was almost too good to be true (and it wasnt, really). Then in the mid“sixties, at the very time academic ambition and academic excellence were incestuously mating on Catholic premises, came the first stroke of doom. A series of lawsuits challenged confessional institutions for being too sectarian to qualify for federal funds . . . just when it had become unimaginable to exist without those new dollars.

Gallin leads us through that fearful, fateful decade from the mid“sixties to the mid“seventies, when Catholic educators pleadingly assured American Academe that their faith might have been just a sentimental memory, a topic of history, a conventional courtesy, a tightly sequestered idiosyncrasy, a financially useful constituency, a legitimate object of detached curiosity”but never, never , an acknowledged resource of intellectual perspective, or inspired imagination, or critical judgment. Faith was not really the community or the culture of Catholic education, not even a component; it was only a peripheral. And what the educators were swearing was true began to become so, even if it had not been so when they first started saying it.

Doom took the form of a legal challenge to governmental funding of new facilities at four Maryland colleges: Horace Mann League v. Board of Public Works of Maryland . The case was filed in the Maryland Courts in 1963, adjudicated in 1966, and finally decided after various appeals in 1976. Judgment was given against the two Catholic colleges involved, whereat their lawyers strenuously counseled Catholic educational officials across the nation to eliminate all sectarian features of their institutions that might compromise their secularity.

In the years to follow, U.S. higher education underwent a terrifying financial crisis. The Catholic educators were the most terrified. As Gallins narrative makes plain (despite her disappointing failure to see its lessons), the direct threat of insolvency paralyzed any inclination to sustain the Catholic character of their higher education. The energy to disqualify faith was coming now from Catholics themselves, not from their cultured despisers.

Henceforth Catholics were not to be suspiciously numerous on their own campuses. They were not to be dominant (and not, for Gods sake, brazenly recruited) among trustees, administrators, faculty, or student body. No academic course, service of worship, or student activity with a discernibly Catholic sentiment could be required of anyone. No policy or undertaking based on Catholic idiosyncrasy could be enacted or enforced, lest the federal subsidies be misused.

Now this was not quite what the Supreme Court had said to the Catholic educators, but with so much finance at risk, this was what their lawyers regarded as a prudently protective over“response. It coincided closely with an energetic conviction then growing amidst many educated American Catholics that assimilation was not just politic but providential. So the Catholic clients could be wantonly docile to their lawyers admonitions, since the new accommodations to secular practice were felt to be a timely and respectable upgrade.

Apart from some deplorably shrill Cassandras (Gallin not among them), few Catholics protested. This was because they could not have imagined what a denaturing change this was going to inflict on the campuses that had so recently become estimable. They assumed (wrongly) that the old place would stay pretty much the same demographically because, after all, only people drawn by a sense of sympathy and solidarity with the Catholic faith would want to come to a Catholic campus to teach or to study. They could not anticipate how readily religiously indifferent or even hostile academics would, as Deep Throat would later put it, follow the money.

The book recounts a fascinating early hint of what was underway. For Catholics, the sixties were a time when John XXIIIs Pacem in Terris , the Councils Decree on Ecumenism, Hans Küngs The Council, Reform, and Reunion , and the gracious sharing of appreciation and pulpits (and, in some places, communion) brought Catholics into wonderfully warmer relations with their separated brethren. But at the same time a little“noticed St. Louis survey ominously suggested another sort of outcome. During the sixties, while the number of graduates from Catholic high schools who went to college increased by 33 percent, the number going to Catholic colleges decreased by 43 percent. A national Jesuit poll reported an abrupt 10 percent drop in Catholics in their student bodies. Gallins study pauses at this point to notice with historian Philip Gleason a significant movement in the direction of secular norms of excellence and away from the older belief that Catholic higher education should embody and make available to its students a distinctive Catholic educational vision. But his insight is not one she pursues.

During the sixties and seventies, when American college enrollment increased fourfold, the increase at Catholic colleges was sevenfold. Much of the increase was not in the intellectual disciplines but in vocational training, another change that debilitated the capacity of the institutions to be dynamic communities of intellectual inquiry and conviction. Even less were they likely to develop convictions that might be alternatives to the ruling American and academic orthodoxies.

At this point the book turns to another narrative, one in which the author has been even more intimately involved. Just as the Catholic educators were making their peace with academic and civic imperatives, their Church moved in on them from another quarter, with the unspoken inference that the U.S. Catholic body scholastic was short of breath . . . or Breath. By 1975, Gallin recalls, Catholic educators were fairly certain that their eligibility for federal funds would be upheld by the courts. But now they were being challenged by the Vatican: How, after a surrender of yet unknown extent to the civil and academic authorities, could universities and colleges advertising themselves as Catholic consistently refuse to allow the Catholic Church similarly to set her standards of faithful performance?

As Gallin tells this story in which she has been an important and partisan character, the keynote of the annoying Vatican intervention has been neither candor nor cunning, but a relentless persistence. The Curia people are repeatedly stiff“armed, but they repeatedly return to the issue. The fellows in Rome arent all that bright, but they never seem to give in or go away. University presidents continued to name Gallin as one of their negotiators even during her retirement, so her account of Rome“as“Panmunjom is not simply archival. She recounts how the presidents kept playing the winning cards of Academic Freedom and Autonomy, and could not understand why they failed to trump. They argued for Openness, Humanity, Dynamic Change, Renewal, Scholarship, Excellence”all the academic absolutes. The Vatican people smiled, but kept saying that they needed to verify whether it was a Catholic Openness, or Humanity, or Whatever.

If the American campuses really were Catholic, as ardently claimed, then surely they had to be openly answerable like every other entity in the world claiming the same fidelity . . . to the Catholic Church. The presidents insisted Rome would just have to trust their efforts. But by this time the folks in Rome were treating the American word like the Russian ruble, and insisted they needed to take a closer look and judge for themselves. The Americans talked dialogue as an improvement on confrontation; the fellows drawn from many nations to Rome, while loath to be confrontational, have been obdurate, perhaps because they remember times when that Sees service to the Church (and the world) has had to fall back upon obduracy as fidelitys last resort.

The Gallin account makes clear her enduring loyalty to the hold“out presidents, but she acknowledges that the danger to the identifiable Catholic character of most of the colleges was and is not imaginary. Although the presidents have reacted strongly against any proposal for a clear juridical relationship with the hierarchy, they have not been able to articulate with precision the characteristics of their institutions which they regard as giving [them their] Catholic identity. By this time the reader may be drawn to believe that it is not precision but candor that is lacking.

Gallin takes up George Marsdens home truth: In seeking diversity of faculty and students in every institution of higher learning, have we overlooked the need for a diversity among institutions? If homogeneity takes over, then how can a community hand on its distinctive character? But then she falls to speaking again of a core of educators committed to the Catholic mission, and one realizes she simply does not get it. This is not a task for a core of the confused. It requires legions of the committed.

Nowhere in this earnest chronicle does the author allow herself to consider that those into whose careless hands a waning but prosperous Catholic ministry, built up with such great pluck for so many years, has been entrusted, and who have insisted with ardor that Rome should underwrite whatever they do as the best that Catholics could hope for, are like your lovable, ex“con brother“in“law who keeps wanting you to co“sign the loan for his Jaguar.

Ishmael Law writes on Catholic theology and education. ]]>Ishmael Lawhttp://www.firstthings.com/article/2000/08/negotiating-identity-catholic-higher-education-since Faithful for Lifehttp://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/03/003-faithful-for-life
Fri, 01 Mar 1996 00:00:00 -0500Shortly before his death in 1963 Pope John XXIII issued an encyclical with a novel distribution.

Originally, encyclicals were circular letters sent to all

bishops. In modern times the addressees came to

include priests and “all the faithful.” But John sent

Pacem in Terris much further. He proclaimed peace

on earth as far as the angels had sung their carol: “to

all people of good will.”

Paul VI continued this heading on his own great

encyclicals, hoping that the cogency of the faith

could speak to non-Catholics and non-Christians.

And those letters did begin to gain more attention

from that broader, ecumenical, and secular audience.

The American bishops did likewise, and with this

larger audience in mind they began to address more

“public policy” issues. As they did, their mode of

approach naturally adapted itself to their more

diverse audience: no longer the American Catholics,

but the American people . . . and the United States

government. More came of this than was intended.

For a public that now shared few of their convictions,

the bishops were constrained to argue from a thinner

philosophical and political gospel. Some thought

they were more competent and more responsible to

expound the gospel.

Last September the American bishops issued a

document that returns to the pastoral tradition of

expounding the faith to those who should be able to

make sense of it. Faithful for Life: A Moral Reflection

is addressed to the Catholic flock to whom the bishops are primarily responsible. It is their most cogent

pro-life statement thus far. It is believer-friendly, yet it

stings. The reason it may gain a wider hearing is that

the bishops bottom their argument, not on civic or

sociopolitical grounds, but on trademark Catholic

beliefs.

The leading issue is fidelity. Abortion and euthanasia are two instances of ultimate infidelity, whereby

the most helpless members of families become disposable at will if they are felt to be too burdensome. Abortion and euthanasia, the bishops observe, are

both secondary infections of the same infidelity

whereby spouses so commonly walk away from one

another that the American public can hardly even

imagine what it might mean to bind oneself to another, for better or for worse, until death. It is as impossible a notion today as it was when Jesus first said and showed it. The bishops are pleading that by God’s

grace we can”we must”live lives that are obligated

by other persons and their needs. They say we can

manage to do what Jesus did: be faithful to others

whether or not they are faithful to us.

Faithful for Life begins with the story of the Good

Samaritan, an unwelcome foreigner traveling at his

own risk in Judea, who was the only journeyman

ready to rescue a mugging victim from the ditch.

Two locals, bound not to “stand by idly when your

neighbor’s life is at stake” (Leviticus 19:16), had

looked and hurried the other way. Jesus’ praise for

this alien, the bishops note, is not for doing a favor,

because for him it was a duty too: “The victim didn’t

need to be kin or countryman of someone to whom

the rescuer had made a commitment. Anyone lying

helpless in that ditch was neighbor.” “We are all journeying down the road from

Jerusalem to Jericho,” the bishops say, and this parable haunts us because it scorns the dogma of our day:

“that our loyalties and our obligations are owed only

to those of our choice. On the contrary, we owe fidelity to those we choose and, beyond them, to others we

do not choose. It is we who have been chosen to go

out of our way for them.”

So the bishops come out as “anti-choice.” If fidelity

is to be Christian it is owed not only to those to whom

we pledge it but to those whose needs place an equal

claim upon our consciences. The pursuit of one’s

own “interests,” satisfaction, freedom, and preferences”all summed up in “choice””is the watchword

of our culture, and the bishops are explaining how

our culture can become deadly.

American society upholds the doctrine that human

beings find their ultimate sense and fulfillment

in individual freedom. To survive other people’s

competing endeavors”so this belief runs”we must

assert our own solitary “best interests.” Spouses must

enjoy uninhibited freedom, but respect it in their

partners (who are, however, revocable at will). Children (also revocable at will) must be the creatures of

explicit parental choice, and once accepted they must

be helped quickly into the full possession of their

own right to choose (and to fend) for themselves.

Grandparents (revocable also) must retain their vigor

and their distance so as to enjoy their freedom to

choose (but not to impinge too heavily on their children’s choices), up to the timely end of their lives.

Any decline from autonomy to dependence is felt as

an indignity. The desirable outcome of family life,

according to this belief, is a pack of freewheeling

individualists who enjoy unimpeded liberty to do

what they choose, limited minimally by their agreement not to impede one another’s liberty. This exaltation of individual free choice has, naturally, put

fidelity owed to others into full eclipse.

Predictably, a “plague effect” has been visited on

children by their parents’ failures to form or maintain commitments to each other. Studies indicate

that the children of severed partnerships are in a

great many ways at a disadvantage by comparison

with those whose parents remain together. They are

more impoverished and more likely to subside into

welfare, to perform poorly in their studies and to

drop out of school, to become involved in Juvenile

crime and its legal penalties, to require treatment for

physical illnesses and emotional disturbances, and to

be at risk for sexual abuse. Even more dismaying,

perhaps, are indications that this pathology intensifies as it is passed on. These same children are also

more likely to drift into adolescent sex, pregnancy,

and cohabitation, and thereby the increased likelihood that their own marriages will disintegrate.

The increasing acceptance of disposable relationships and the exaltation of divorce are but single

episodes in a long subversion of fidelity that has

changed the nature of the familial undertaking at its

root. It is not happenstance that the country which

offers the least legal protection in the developed

world for the unborn is the same country that offers

the least legal protection for the victims of divorce.

Abortion and euthanasia, the bishops argue, bring

home to us in a newly violent way how drastic is our

disbelief in fidelity. For it has become obvious to any

Catholic willing to see it that what was once constituted as a commitment has shriveled to a wish. “The

home becomes the place where, when you knock,

they no longer have to let you in.”

The Catholic Church has historically argued that

free and deliberate choice is indeed an essential element in any Christian marital bond. But there is a

companion teaching. We can and do incur other

bonds without choosing them, as when we are begotten by parents and when we are gifted with children.

“We are bound to our children, not because we chose

them, but because we were given them: simply

because they are our children, our very near neighbors.”

Even the marital bond transcends choice, for one

has committed oneself not only to the spouse one

married, but to that spouse with all of his or her

eventual developments of character and circumstance. We cannot discharge ourselves of our spouses

or our kinfolk or our neighbors in their authentic

needs without damaging our own capacity to love.

And once we have accepted this fidelity as an inmost

need in our lives, who knows in advance how many

times we will have to turn aside from our journeys

along that road from Jerusalem to Jericho?

It is clear that the bishops are expressing an unusually sharp critique of the national culture. It is a

prophetic moment for them.

“Abortion, and now euthanasia, have become

socially accepted acts because many have been persuaded that people unfairly lose their freedom when

others make claims on them that pose burdens and

obligations. In the course of a very few years many

people have come to think of an unplanned baby as

an unwanted baby, and of an undesired baby as an

undesirable one. The prescribed social remedy has

been to put an end to the baby’s life before fie or she

can make a claim on ),ours.” Such violations of

human life and human dignity are now “expounded

upon in classrooms, prescribed by physicians, condoned by public figures, protected by courts, subsidized by legislatures, and even advertised in the Yellow Pages. How has it come to pass that the

elimination of one’s child or one’s parent, acts of desperation wrought in every age, are now described as